The Dharan Dispatch

Dharan is a city known for its great taste in fashion, music, and cleanliness.

It is home to the second biggest community of Gorkha servicemen’s families who have generously contributed to better the city’s image. Given their expat experience of living in developed countries, these families have tried to replicate the first world cleanliness in some pockets of the city, and thankfully, this sentiment has resonated well with other residents here.

Combine that with Dharan’s pleasant weather all year round and you’ll get a city that prides on squeaky clean neighborhoods and breathes fresh oxygen.

“Dharan” literally means a saw pit; which is what the place used to be famous for before Britons came here to recruit young Gorkhas in their army. The city sits slanted on the foothills of the Mahabharata Range and serves as the gateway to a paradise of green hills and mountain rivers known as Arun Valley. Seen from the adjacent hills of Bhedetar on a clear night, the magically strewn city lights in Dharan mirror the stars glistening on the sky.

While entering the city from south, a fascinating statue of a warrior shot with arrows all over his body welcomes the visitors. It’s a statue of a martyr soldier Sri Junga erected on the premises of Yalambar Park which is locally famous among picnickers in the city. A road that detours from this point works as a tree-lined back entrance to B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, which is covered in a little more detail further down.

Dharan marketplace is laid along the main road that dissects the city into halves; the market stretch slopes down from a Y-junction called Zero Mile and runs till Bhanu Chowk where the city’s bus terminal is located. If you’re driving from north to south — and the traffic is not cumbersome — you can put your engine on neutral and freewheel along the market without putting the brakes on!

Many of the neighborhoods in the city are different than what they looked like two decades ago. One a dark night in 1988, an earthquake of 6.6 Richter scale ruptured the slumbering city of Dharan, leaving it in rubbles of its past. More than 5,000 people lost their lives, and a clock tower memorial in Bhanu Chowk was constructed to commemorate the untimely deaths.

Bhanu Chowk is the first leg of Dharan Bazaar, and if you are game for some pork momos, you will love the small restaurants and roadside eateries here that pamper customers with their generously served dumplings. It is also one of the best known spots for apparel shopping in the city. The city is made up of many other beautiful neighborhoods with quirky names like Chata Chowk, Ranga Chowk, Hattisar, Bhote Pul, etc.

From the marketplace, one can see the surrounding hills that house some famous temples in the region. Temples of Hindu importance such as Dantakali, Pindeshwar, Budha Subba and Panch Kanya are all located in the residential hill of Bijaypur on the east.

Besides its holy significance, Budha Subba Temple is famous among lovebirds who carve their names next to each other on bamboo trees growing inside the temple premises — believing that it will strengthen their bond. Another unique thing about these bamboo trees is that they are truncated at the top unlike other bamboo species.

Locals associate the rare genetics of these bamboos to an interesting folklore; one day a young hunter named Budha Subba who roamed the forest with his slingshot, accidentally struck the tip of the bamboos instead of his target — a pack of crows cawing there. It is believed that the trees stopped growing their tips since then, and the crows never flew back. The hunter must have experienced some miraculous epiphany afterwards, because he buried his slingshot and meditated to gain enlightenment at the same spot where a temple was built years after his demise.

In a region where scavenging crows are a commonplace annoyance, the birds are nowhere to be found near Budha Subba premises, despite the fact that devotees coming here scatter edibles on the premises for the foraging birds.

Dantakali is another temple with a revered mythological story. It is believed that the temple is one of the self-manifested sacred places where the charred organ — in this case, set of teeth — of Lord Shiva’s first wife Sati fell at.

When an enraged Lord Shiva was travelling around earth’s surface mourning the death of his first wife Sati (who self-immolated herself in rebellion of not being allowed to wed Lord Shiva), her burnt organs fell at 51 places and were eventually turned into temples known as Shakti Piths. Dantakali is where Sati’s teeth set had dropped (Danta=teeth; kali=a form of Goddess Durga). Thousands of devotees flock here every year and especially in larger crowds during Navaratri Puja, nine days before Nepalese celebrate Dashain.

Fast forward to the present-day, Dharan during daybreak is dotted with lean-bodied adolescent boys running on the streets here preparing for their enlistment in the well-paying British Army. That is how a huge majority of families in Dharan continue the legacy of their forefathers who took the same route several decades ago for sustaining livelihood.

The youth of Dharan is also well-known for their sharp dressing style. Until a decade ago, many of these youngsters, largely unsupervised because their earning parents stayed abroad, were infamous for being spendthrift and being involved in gang fights, drugs, etc. The tag of being Dharaney used to make a hostile statement to outsiders.

When I was in 7th or 8th grader in school, I witnessed the first-hand account of the notorious Dharaney way.

One day when school was over and kids dressed in blue and maroon uniforms were milling around the streets before heading home, I saw a small crowd gather in an open field just a few blocks away from our school building. All of a sudden, the said crowd broke in a frantic fisticuffs. A short guy with a mongoloid features, dressed in black overcoats and equipped with brass knuckles, had punched a rival guy several times; the latter ended up being knocked out on the ground for everyone to see.

It turned out, some Dharaney boys studying in my school, known officially as “boarders” because they lived in the school’s hostel, had their fellas come over from Dharan to teach their local “enemies” some lesson. That was the extent of reputation Dharaney gangs had earned — travelling all the way to another city to even out a score on the streets.

Rich Dharaney kids addicted to drugs was another known phenomenon; their go-to destination for buying drugs was Jogbani, a bordering Indian town south of Biratnagar. I had never seen anyone doing any drugs in my life, i.e., until I sat right next to members of a music band in Dharan who took turns to take a hit of a white powder (that I believe must have been heroine).

A friend from my hometown who was also into music had coaxed me to accompany him to Dharan for running his errands. Once we reached there, his whim directed him to pay a visit to the band’s rehearsal studio — a shanty with poke-holed tin roof that let sun-rays filter inside the dusty room. The band was kind of famous in the region and I personally liked one of their music videos.

Tall and dusky and with unfurled black hair falling on their shoulders, these guys wore faded jeans torn at their knees and behaved friendly beyond their punk looks. I tried to play it cool and quietly observed one of them unfold a pouch of the powder drugs from his jeans pocket; he sprinkled the powder on top of a neatly flattened chewing gum wrapper, with its silver side facing down. He explained my friend that the small pouch of drugs, probably weighing no more than 15 grams, cost them about Nepali Rs. 1500 — quiet costly even by today’s standards.

The four of them, my friend and I crouched in a circle, and the guy with “the good stuff” flicked a lighter and cooked the powder for a few minutes before inhaling the smoke through a thin glass pipe. I’ll never forget the way they casually they put on their dark shades to hide their misty red eyes and walked out confidently in the marketplace in the aftermath of the drug session.

Growing up, I remember reading a damning news about Dharan’s youth that stuck in my mind for many months to come. The Dharan police was investing a mysterious trend of dogs disappearing from many homes in the city. They eventually busted gangs of local youth who apparently took the poor pups in the forest and feasted on their meat, because of its purported intoxicating quality.

The dense forest surrounding Dharan is not only a safe haven for drug abusers, but is home to many wildlife animals such as macaque monkeys, pachyderms, barking deer, wild dogs and so on. The forest is known as Char Koshey Jhadi, deriving its nomenclature from the fact that it was 16 miles wide until a few decades. But width was just one side to it; the woods ran for scores of miles in length.

On several occasions when travelling to and from Dharan, we have spotted — and sometimes been forced to stop — by a herd of majestic elephants jauntily crossing the highway. Similarly, monkeys fooling around looking for a quick snack or a pack of deer scuttling through the trees are equally common sights in this part of the stretch. Thousands of bird species are also a part of the local ecosystem and the evergreen forest vegetation is mostly populated with tropical trees.

Dharan is surrounded by two major rivers, Shardi Khola to the west and Seuti River to the east — the latter runs through the forest on the way to the city and used to be a popular mention in the regional folk songs. Travelers coming to Dharan fear Seuti Khola because it flows through the middle of a lonely forest and is believed to be haunted, regardless of the fact that it is located close to a sharp curve in the highway that is prone to accidents.

Shardi Khola is more of a skinny-dipping destination for local youths. A small freshwater creek called Nishane Khola lies north on the way to Bhedetar, but is largely unknown to tourists.

Dharan is also famous for B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, more popular by its nickname Ghopa Camp among thousands of patients coming from all over the region. The medical facility, originally built by Britishers, was developed as a major healthcare center in cooperation with the Indian government and received university status in 1998. The sprawling lush green grounds, clean blacktop asphalt roads and beautiful walkways are vivid reminders of the British footprints left here. Ghopa Camp also houses Delhi Public School in its premises, reputed for its academic excellence in the region.

Also, nestled quietly in one of the corners is Nirvana Country Club, which has earned a marked distinction for its fine dining, luxurious accommodation and a 69-hectare-large golf course. On a cool day, you can walk in for an alfresco dining under the leafy trees while watching deer graze in a distance not-so-far from where you sit.